The next era of self storage

This transcript is auto-generated, so it may contain errors.

Aled Bidder: Hi there. Welcome to Stora's Summit 2026. We're just so thrilled to have you all here with us today and we'll get kicked off here in a moment. I'm Aled Bidder and I'll be your host today and you may be wondering “Who is this person?” and that's probably because I'm a member of the technical team here at Stora and we don't tend to speak to people. We don't tend to speak to people. Unless something's gone wrong, of course, I remember actually one of our first meetups with Stora. An operator approached us engineers. You can usually spot us because we tend to huddle together in a corner somewhere and the operator was very lovely and very polite and just wanted to raise a small issue with a feature we just released, a feature that I'd happened to build and queue the entire engineering team swinging their arms around in unison to point at me. That can be the exposure that we have to the people who run the sites that Stora powers but that's why I'm so excited about today because there's a chance for us all to get together and talk, not just about feature requests or bug reports but about the self storage industry, where it is today and where it's heading. And I have to admit when I first started working for Stora about five years ago, I don't think I understood. I'd quite appreciate how interesting an industry that self storage is. How exciting, how dare I say sexy. Maybe that's going a little bit too far but it generally is such a fun and interesting space to work in.

We're just loads of opportunity and I'm sure that's something you all feel. So we put together a day today that's just jam-packed full of talks and panels from leading experts in the industry, people who've been there and done it, who haven't been afraid of trying something new and are willing to share that experience with the wider community and we can't wait to share that with you today. So just before we get started, just a little bit of housekeeping. There'll be refreshments available out in the foyer. We'll have a little break for lunch and again this afternoon. We've set up an Ask Us Anything desk at the back, which is staffed by our product and our customer success team. So if you have any questions, anything you want to talk to us about, please just feel free to come up. And yeah, we'd love to talk to you. There's also an interactive screen next to it, where we'll be putting up different questions throughout the day and we just love your engagement with that if you've got a second. You'll notice that some people are wearing wristbands. That's for entry to the afterparty tonight in Clays. So if you don't have a wristband and you'd like to purchase one, just please speak to a member of the team and we'll sort that out for you. If you could put your phones on silent, that would be much appreciated, especially during my bits. And yeah, I think that's everything.

So without further ado, I'd like to bring up on stage someone who's been working for years to grow, modernise and help operators think differently about what's possible in this industry, the CEO and founder of Stora, Gavin Shields.

Gavin Shields: Hi everybody. Thank you, Aled. Thanks very much for that. It's great to be here and thank you so much for everyone. It's everyone for coming. It's been intimidating looking out and seeing all these great names of the industry being here. So we really, really appreciate your attendance here today and hopefully we all come away with something really valuable from today as well.

At Stora, we believe that self storage is no longer a property business with a website just tacked on the side. We believe it's becoming a technology business itself. So I think I maybe misspoke that. We don't believe it's a property business anymore with a website tacked on. We believe it's becoming a technology business itself that just happens to own buildings. And that changes in coming. It's already here. We think about what's changed in self storage over the last five years or so. People booking online 24/7, mostly on their mobile phones, people entering without meeting a member of staff, unstaffed sites, all of this stuff's happening, even pricing. It's not a number of people set and forget anymore. It's changing every second based on demand, based on occupancy.

The best operators in this industry are now running revenue playbooks that used to belong only to the really big operators in this industry. And AI, of course, is now doing lots of the hard work as well that used to take a whole team to do. None of this is theoretical anymore. It's happening in facilities up and down the country. But when a shift like this happens, it doesn't lift everybody equally at the same time. It does and can widen the gap between the ones who are moving and the ones who aren't. And I think the operators who are going to lean into this big change is happening now. They're going to compound their advantage. Better pricing, lower costs, better margin, better customer experiences, higher profits, more valuable businesses at the end of the day. So the risk we think isn't really kind of making the wrong move. It's not making a move. And that's what we want to really talk about today is what is happening, what's coming in the industry and how is technology leading that change? Hopefully we can all learn from each other today. It's no longer we think about being the biggest anymore. It's about being the bravest. Some of the smartest, most ambitious operators in the industry aren't the household names, they're independence and many of them are here today doing that exact thing. People who took the risk built something and care about doing it properly.

I think what's exciting is for the first time a lot of the tools that have been used to make that change and drive that change are now available to the smaller operators, the tools that the giants used to use are now available for those. And that's a big inflection point. I think it's not big versus small anymore. It's fast versus slow or brave versus comfortable. So why are we here today? It's hopefully a working day. You'll hear from operators who've done this themselves at scale and actually, you know, we'll really get into the details of how they've done what they're doing. You'll get hard numbers about revenue optimization, dynamic pricing. You'll see hopefully where AI is actually useful today and where it's being genuinely used. And hopefully you'll leave with things you can do tomorrow morning back at work or if you've got a hangover after Clays on Monday morning when you're back in the office. So please ask when there's questions, ask awkward questions, challenge us. We're here to learn as well. Hopefully we can all find a couple of ideas we can bring back to the business next week. So with that, I'm going to move on.